Sternenfall

A little poem surfaced yesterday, perfectly preserved in the recesses of my brain, reappearing now as waters shift in there.

O Sternenfall
von einer Brucke einmal eingesehn--:
Dich nicht vergessen

Stehn.

Translation:

Oh, falling star
once seen from a bridge--:
to not forget you

to endure.

~Rainier Maria Rilke



I don't know any German, not really, but I'm rather good with remembering seemingly meaningless ephemera--foreign words; the precise dates of occurrences inconsequential to me, happening to strangers; someone's face, still puffy with sleep and the old narrow bed; tiny objects held only briefly.

Figure modeling is excellent for memorizing things. You scan through reams of text in your brain as you hold still, so still, and when you come upon something you don't quite recall, caught on a snag, you worry at it, like a bad memory or a bad tooth, thumbing that page over and over in your brain until you can resolve the inaccuracy. I don't know what disturbed that snippet and made me recall it so vividly and suddenly. I stopped working and said the German words aloud. Rather poorly, I suspect, but there was no one else there to hear me torture the language. After writing it, Rilke changed it a little and ended "Der Tod" (Death) with those lines. Rilke said that the last three lines (the ones above) burst in on his brain unbidden, and resolved it suddenly.


Just won an Arty award for being a super genius. Sadly, I probably can't attend the awards party, complete with tantalizing open bar, because I don't actually live in Utah. Maybe I will allow myself a rare beer tonight to celebrate and make up for what I'll miss.

Someone keeps buying things off of my wishlist on Suicidegirls, but sending the gift to themselves or it is lost and absorbed by the postal system. I keep expecting these phantom gifts, in a continued state of mild expectation, checking for little brown packages on my return from school. No packages ever arrive, no stop motion animation DVDs to fill me with the half poison nostolgia from when Tommy and I had a non-dialogue film festival just for us two and his cat, the three of us curled on his couch having thought better of sex and diverting it into obscure sensualities, no behind-the-times comic books for my niche friends to remark on how I just barely started reading that. Is the phantom the gift?

Ping pong

I played table tennis, or rather ping-pong, at the group studio of my friends. The men are kind, gentlemanly, with me when we play. They compliment a good hit, and fail to keep score, patient when I repeatedly lose the tiny white ball. With each other they curl back their lips and expose their incisor teeth as they serve.



On the airplane ride home, I surreptitiously watch Olympic women's single table tennis on my seat mates television. Young asian girls with manly, unflattering haircuts play an awkward and ungainly game, and for some unknown sportsman's reason, players must retrieve errant white plastic balls by themselves. Climbing over barricades, and scrambling around after the ball only serves to make the sport that much more undignified. These girls, however accomplished they may be, will never be the subject of the fantasies of men too old for them, the realm reserved for half realized Amazonian women like countless gymnasts and volleyball players.



I attended the orientation for incoming graduate students three days ago in the courtyard between the college buildings. I don't yet know the better routes to take, and had to carry my bike up stairs in various places; sweat begins to gloss my forehead and back as I arrive at the half circle of unoccupied chairs, the little folding table of juice and chips. Early, I arrive early but am uncertain until I ask. Other people mull around the little galleries ringing the courtyard, filled with the artwork from other schools. I compare my age to their percieved age. Am I old, or young, in comparison to this group? The same question is better translated as "Am I accomplished or am I slow comparatively?" I do not come to a conclusion. My foot is trod on when I try to find a seat, and still I go unnoticed until I bring it to the attention of the person still standing on me. It's a photography student, which I find predictable in the way that personal prejudices are always noted when confirmed. Of course a photographer fails to observe her surroundings. I prefer to feed this dislike of people who have skills I don't have, rather than admitting that I'm the one who made myself omittable.



When the Olympic table tennis player serves the ball, she twists it in her hand, cupping it and turning her wrist around, concealing the action behind the paddle, flicking the ball out suddenly--graceful and deft, like a magic trick, like a promise. I doubt what it will be before the ball reappears, struck by the ready paddle and bouncing across the tiny taut net--perhaps this time it will be something else instead.

Graduate Student Open Studios
September 7th
2pm till 9pm

PS I just broke my camera. I was considering making some thing, like more teacups, to raise money to replace it and then realized that I now had no camera to photograph the items to sell to buy a working camera. Damnit!

Break

Consider this entry a break between the ridiculously overwrought and obtuse entries, because you know that's precisely what the next one will be.

Demon Tamer went live this morning on Suicidegirls.com. Take a looksie, should you want to and are in a place where naked girls are ok to look at.

Do any of you have pictures of the gallery during "Secret"? My pictures of it are predictably horrid.



Open studios this coming weekend at my new school. It's on the 7th, and by the 7th I will have been a graduate student for 6 days. Because of this, all of the stuff I'll have in my studio will not have been made at CSULB, but I'll also have the cleanest studio. Come and gawk at me and my stuff.
GLAMFA and Open Studios

All is Well Within the House

Years ago, before I moved to the terracotta dust storms of Phoenix, before I moved to the small big town Long Beach, when my life was still unpredictable, when two full meals a day seemed almost extravagant and cheap wine and gin weren't inconsequential expenses, I was spending an evening at house of a man whom I had known briefly, but in that sort of way that lets you imagine you knew them better than most. He had a beautifully preserved beetle in his house, hung on the wall in a glass case. I had taught a mutual friend how to re-constitute and move the limbs of dead insects without shattering their exoskeleton, slowly hydrating their tiny strange reverse muscles till it was possible to pose them. I saw the beetle, alien in its perfection, in it's completeness, and I wanted so badly to smash it. The desire to destroy to, to make it into tiny pieces no longer recognizable as perfect and wonderful or even as beetle bits--I could taste that penny taste in my mouth that you get in a fight when you know you will lose but you keep on anyway, because to run away, to leave and preserve yourself, is unthinkable in that moment.



I recall it now. And it tastes the same.

For the first time in over ten years, I heard an old family lie. Initially, I was so saddened and outraged by it, this false image of me. But now, I envy this fabulism, and I dream about that glowing, fictitious naked child, so strong with nascent victory, and feel the reality of me to be so wormlike in contrast, cowering as I am, and recieving unprotesting, where she took what pleased her and destroyed when she had tired of it. She is powerful and full, like a new butterfly over filled of potent new blood so that it drips out of the ends of its wings.



But so many, people who knew me the best I thought, believed in her, in that shining ideal evil, all bright eyed and deliberate. Believed, that at least briefly when I was pushing my nymphette years to their last, that I was her. In "1984," Winston is asked where the past is. He responds that it is in memory.

I did not destroy the beetle. I just saw it a few days ago while on a trip to Salt Lake City, in a different house but still owned by the same boy.

"You look so healthy." I told him.



"It is because I am full of poison," he said.

Far Below, post reception

The show which I have referred to often, in hopes that someone will praise me for the massive amount of work it required, as the show which was produced in one month. Thus far, no one has been terribly impressed, which leads me to believe that I over-estimate my own endeavours. Anyhow, the show looked lovely, a fact which was largely ignored by most of the gallery attendees.

You see, Pravus Gallery is divided into three spaces, and my show "Far Below" occupied the middle of the three spaces. The first space had a group show of custom vinyl toys (Moodys, actually), and was a great testament to horror vacui*, all tiny details and bright colors. The third space is occupied by Synthetic Compound, a vinyl toy shop and a similar description as above can be accurately applied to it. And there was my show inbetween, with big pools of space between the pieces and bereft of any colors besides the black and white of monochromatic relief printing.

Perhaps if my work cannot visually compete, then I should re-think my approach to art. I should do this, but I'm not going to. Instead, I'm going to assign the smaller crowd that my show attracted as the inevitable sifting that intellectually superior art must do. See what I did there? I took a situation which illustrated my artistic shortcomings and made it into the opposite. Because I'm deluded like that.

Because of the short notice of this show, I was unable to do much in the way of publicity for it. But my friend at the local weekly wrote a short piece on it, mostly about how I was shortly to leave Phoenix. And now everyone asks when we're going to move, and we respond with the reply, disappointingly lacking in urgency, that we leave in a month and a half. It's like putting on the turn signal blocks in advance of the actual turn.


That's me with the backpack. I have to wear gloves nearly all of the time for reasons that I won't go into. Suffice it to say, they are not fashion inspired reasons. So I'm up against the inability to dress reasonably well with gloves and not looking very gothy, or not looking like a pretensious nance, wearing gloves in a Phoenix summer. Do you have any glove wearing recommendations? They must be full gloves, no thug-ish looking fingerless nonsense.




The Fish. I'm most proud of the fish. It's the first piece I've made that skipped the intermediary step of making a blank of the pattern to test it, and then to draw the image on. For the fish, I drew the original pattern and the drawing directly onto the material before cutting, and didn't know if the whole thing would work until after printing it and sewing it together.



By the by, we're now accepting submissions for Super Fun Activity Challenge 2, Activity Quest.

Far Below

Ah, I've never worked so hard for so little before. Come and be disappointed in me! I'll be the mousey looking character trying to blend into the wall

Super Fun!

Last night was amazing! Not only was Super Fun Activity Challenge a great and wonderful success, but I then went home exhausted and had a sci-fi dream about terraforming Mars and inadvertently becoming immortal.



I had two entries in the book, and this is the finished product of one of them, "Make a Homeowners' Association":


My now super famous and successful friend Trent Call. Trent just had a two page feature in Juxtapoz, with full color and adoring interview. I was so jealous that it took me two whole days to congratulate him after seeing it. But, ever the opportunist, I invited Trent to come to APE and table with us in November, riding the wake of his success to sell comics and toys.



Do you want a Super Fun Activity Challenge? They are exceedingly easy to procure! All one need do is send me $5 for the book and $2 for the shipping, and I will send you a lovely copy, guaranteed to be chock-a-block with super fun. Message me for my paypal address. If you're in Phoenix, you can bypass the $2 shipping and stop by the Trunk Space, at 1506 NW Grand, and pick one up there for $5.

I've got another show opening on May 2nd at Pravus Gallery in Phoenix. It will be called either "The Ocean" or "The Deep." I haven't decided which, but I'd better decide soon as I'm making the cards tomorrow. All of the work for this show I'm making in the month prior to the opening. I've never done something so last minute before, so I'm both eager and terrified to see how I make out.

Long Beach

Ahh, Long Beach. The word "seduction" was mentioned more than once by the faculty and current grad students I spoke with while I was there, and I must admit that it was not inappropriate. The presses. Oh! The presses they had there sent me into such flurries of anticipation. What large and unweildy useless things I could make with access to those presses.

The Los Angeles area is so green. It's positively vulgar the amount of herbivorous procreation that goes on there on an daily basis. Having grown up largely in the desert, I can identify most of the native and nonnative plants that grow here, but there, I'd no idea what most everything was. It sort of all blurred together into a giant green mass, smelling strongly of unidentified lilies. My decision on school is still officially unmade, though I'm still terrified of the winter at the other option. Like most major decisions, this one is being made by a spreadsheet.

Asphalt and Air did an email interview with me, and reading through it I sadly realize what poor editing skills I have. But I take solace knowing that I'm a visual arts major, and being able to spell with any degree of literacy is an achievement.

Emily B, a wonderful fiber artist, featured some of my work on her blog.

And Found Object did a little feature, too.

All of this blog-related exposure convinced some poor sap to buy this fellow, of which I, of course, could only take only take the worst of photos before mailing her off:


Figure modeling, that old standby of wellpaying and extraordinarily dull work that I find myself regularly swearing off of and then returning to whenever I'm at all hard up had produced these two paintings, or, more accuratley put, David Alvarado and James Buck produced these two paintings marginally related to me holding still for too long.

Tentacle

Yesterday was Pi Day, and I'm certain you're already familiar with it. It's the sort of made up holiday that I find not nearly as insufferable as the others. On Pi Day, what does one do? Calculate the diameter of various circles, and see how far you can name off its various digits? Far less irritating than saying "Arrr" after every phrase. My friend Kevin's birthday was also yesterday, and never before had he realized that his birthday coincided with a made-up holiday. He's the one who bought he monkey, so I went to his party, even though I usually find most of his friends about as sufferable as Talk Like a Pirate day. We visited the monkey, hung from the porch rafters and bestrewn with ropes of LEDs. I'll admit, that despite my better self, I was worried about what would happen to this, my largest of all creations, once it was in Kevin's possession, and I was pleased with what he was doing with it. I cannot ask for anything better than being well lit and with no severe damaging.

All schools have written back, and I've not been rejected to a one. The letters of acceptance are hung like trophies from the print drying rack. From a school in the great Frozen North, a letter came describing the various grants and scholarships of merit that they had awarded me, the total of which was somewhat more than I had made last year. The amount stared up from the paper at me, beseechingly. A great wadge of institutionalized money, just waiting for a kind hearted person like myself to spend it. But I must remain strong! I steal myself against the sad saucer eyes of the Minneapolisian money, and decide to see if the school in Long Beach might see their way to giving me some sor of similar amount. Truth be told, I'm terrified of living somewhere as cold as Minneapolis. My personal insulation isn't much, and I don't know well I'd function at those temperatures. Next weekend the boy and I will travel to the coast to wheedle and coax, and perhaps there will then be an additional chunk of institutionalized money whose feelings I must consider.



A few Phoenicians, some Chicagoans, a distant Argentinian, a couple of Los Angelinos, an affianced San Franciscan, a homesick New Yorker, and a great variety of Saltines have or shortly will recieve a single disembodied tentacle. For the sake of my wallet, I restricted the list to only those whose company I have physically been in the presence of. I envision a small town's worth of people, having consternation clearly read on their faces as they empty package's contents to find that single tentacle. Because, my darlings, I love you, but in a way that is best expressed through the language of perverse fetishism.



If you were an attendee at my last solo show, ages in the distant past of last year's Autumn, you may have remembered these blank fawns that I made. They sold out within the first 45 minutes of the show, mostly because they were evidently the least disturbing and lowest priced of my extensive scion. But now, they can be had at the Frosty Darling Boutique in Salt Lake City, and The TrunkSpace in Phoenix. But if you aren't in either city and still want one, you can get it from my website just as soon as I find my way to updating the damn thing. And if you aren't one of the lucky few to be counted as among my most best beloved, then you can pretend you are by buying a tentacle from Synthetic Compound.



Phoenix is host to particularly fine weather right now. I don't have any delusions about how long it will last, but I'm rather pleased that I get to see the city with a smattering of green over the dust and brown. It still isn't half as pretty as most places I've lived, but it's tolerable for now, and I'll be leaving in the next couple of months while it's still pretending that it's a habitable place.

A great pallet of Lorica arrived last month, and orders that had backed up for weeks and months were suddenly addressed. I've beening doing nothing but make belts for what seems like ages now. And now I'm nearly done, and I don't care with what you keep your pants aloft, so long as I've nothing to do with it.

Wasps

Reduction style relief print, on a tetrahedron kite, edition of 20. Made for the Kite show at Trunkspace, and the kite part is made out of old chopsticks.

Super Fun Activity Challenge

Deadline extended by two weeks!

Also, I heard back from the first school, and I was accepted to CSULB. Two more to go before I make a decision, but pretty awesome nonetheless!

Sometimes, as I fall asleep I compose elegant sentences descirbing what I've done that day and what I will do the next. I use words like "rubicund," to make simple bruises or poor complexions seem more exceptional and wonderful than they are. Only rarely do I ever commit those lambent words to a physical form, and then I realize just what I hideous pedantic egoist I am.

Before hanging the Kite show a few days ago, Caleb and I had to take down the monkey from where he was hung from the ceiling of the Trunk Space, looming. I tied his arms to his spine, and tied his legs and tail together, so that what was intended to be carried aloft by seven people, could be transported by just the two of us. Someone finally bought the great puppet recently, for a rather paltry sum, that I find kingly knowing that I was shortly to cut the monkey down and throw him away, having run out of patience for finding storage spaces large enough to accomodate him around the house.



The Kite show was only marginally successful. When it rains in Phoenix, as it did last night during the opening reception, Phoenicians panic and approach the weather as though it were an transitive beast, uncertain where it may strike next. Their prior experience with light drizzles ending in only creating more muddy clay around the city they adamantly ignore, and stay locked up inside residences waiting for when the rain turns to something more insideous. Phoenicians have read far too much Hemingway. Nonetheless, nearly all of the artists did come, and the sprinkling of artists' girlfriends and boyfriends made it seem like a far more successful turnout than it actually was.

I made tetrahedron kites with reduction style woodcut wasps on them, and I steeled myself against an evening of listening to people comment on the "bees."



The next reception for the Kite show is on First Friday, March 7th. My next solo is at Deus Ex Machine in Phoenix, opening May 2nd.

Ants

Ants.

Stoic

Last weekend, I modeled for Dr. Sketchy's. It was unbelievably cold, and in most of the pictures I have a sort of pained and stoic expression on my face. Most of the people drawing didn't take off their coats, and a couple wore gloves.

The panties and hosiery were made by Lipstich Cyanide.

Applications for grad school were sent to Austin, and Chicago. I'm working on the other three, and nearly done. Not much else to report at this time.

In suits

New poster art. I think I'm going to try to sell the original on gigposters.com or something. The last one I gave away, and the one before that was just a photoshop composite of painting with text overlaid, but this one I've actually still got and I need some W.A.M. soon to deflect all the costs of making slides, and getting transcripts, and paying fees, and overnighting packages.



My first show for 2008. I was much more excited when I was initially invited to be in this show than I am about it now. Most of the artists aren't printmakers, but I guess that just means I get to show everyone else up with my sweet actual printmaker action.


I'll be modeling for Dr. Sketchy's tomorrow (Sunday, December 30th) at Trunkspace in Phoenix, 1506 NW Grand from 7 to 10 pm. I need to dig up something remotely burlesque-y to wear.

Old rejected set. Say stuff about it, if you're so inclined.

2 to 3 years

One day, I want to meet Cory McAbee, so that my mouth may fill with cumbersome rocks, impossible to talk around.

For the past few years, each time I curate a show, I always invite him to participate. He's yet to accept, but always responds with witty demuring emails.

Suicidegirls recently rejected this action:

In this series of photos, I illustrate the American style pronunciation of Roethke. Very informative. Click on the picture if you're the sort interested in that manner of thing.


I'm knee deep in graduate school application nonsense. I've narrowed my list down to 5 schools, and am laboring away at the essays, attempting wit and brevity and brilliance in short 120 eighty character lines. The great morass of slides was reduced to a coherent and Spartan 20 (15 for Austin), but I'm afraid that I can't find any of my old ethings to include. Hopefully, that one oversite won't cost me. The hope is that Long Beach, Austin, Chicago, Providence, or Minneapolis will be my residence of 2 to 3 years at least.

Any of you Phoenicians reading this should consider attending the last Phoenix Dr. Sketchy's of 2007 at Trunk Space, Dec. 30th. I shall be there, this time for reals.

Salt Lake, Again

At my friend Xkot's salon, Elegba has a spot in the corner, next to the door (where Elegba should be) and I imagine, that given Xkot's reputation for being so adept at cutting children's hair, Elegba must lose quite a few of his lollipops. Xkot gives people a slightly different version of themselves, the well coiffed and groomed version, so it seems fitting that Elegba is there to be ingratiated to at this occasion, this switching over. I went to a printmaker's lecture once where the artist showed us slides, and before she turned the lights back on to resume the lecture, she gave a small offering to Elegba, because she didn't know what would be there when the lights went back on. That's how I first met Eshu, first heard of what he was responsible for.

Above Elegba, my dinosaur and nervous hospital pony stand next to Xkot's heart. Xkot gave me a hair cut, and it took him not quite all of five minutes. Xkot has my two favorite dolls from this series, or at least he has them in his salon until I take them back or someone buys them. I keep meaning to take those two, the nervous pony, and the bighanded cautius little man, but always decide that whoever buys art from a salon with Elegba in the corner in Utah of all places, must be a good sort and a deserving home.



My sister's children adore me. I find it's easy to maintain such adoration when you see someone rarely and always bring gifts when you do visit. And well worth the getting of presents to hear the crimson haired hellions yell a garbled version of your name shrilly when you arrive.






My favorite gallery was sold. After January, Kayo Gallery will be in the hands of a some strange woman, who may not be so lax about display methods as Kenny was. I tensely await the outcome.